When John Goodrich began his visit to Manas National Park—one of India’s most magnificent and potentially important landscapes for tigers—six years ago, it was against a backdrop of violent civil unrest.

Panthera has partnered with Save the Tiger Fund to bring together two of the most influential and experienced tiger conservation groups in the world.

Save the Tiger Fund + Panthera

In 2011, Panthera and Save the Tiger Fund joined forces to carry out the most effective conservation activities possible to save the future of wild tigers. This partnership combines decades of experience and success in identifying conservation priorities, utilizing best practices, and implementing proven strategies to address the many challenges facing wild tigers today.

From 1995 to 2011, Save the Tiger Fund supported hundreds of wild tiger conservation projects across tiger range states in Asia. In 2006, Panthera launched the Tigers Forever Program to address the most critical threats to tigers and to improve the effectiveness of conservation actions.

Together, Save the Tiger Fund and Panthera will continue to deploy strategically focused financial and technical resources in order to save tigers in the wild by investing greater resources in on-the-ground tiger conservation initiatives utilizing the Tigers Forever strategy, which aims to increase tiger numbers by at least 50% at key sites over a ten-year period.

The tiger is one of the most iconic animals on earth, but the largest of the big cats is on the brink of extinction. Tigers are globally listed as "Endangered" on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. Two of the remaining sub-species — Malayan and Sumatran — are "Critically Endangered." As recently as 100 years ago, as many as 100,000 wild tigers roamed across Asia. Today, about 3,900 tigers are left in the wild, occupying a mere four percent of their former range. This catastrophic population decline is driven by a range of threats, including poaching for the illegal wildlife trade, overhunting of prey species by local people, habitat loss and fragmentation, and human-tiger conflict.

"There are probably no more than 3,900 tigers left in the wild. People are stalking them, people are hunting them, people are taking down the last remnants of their habitat. We can’t let this species go extinct." - Dr. Alan Rabinowitz, Panthera Co-Founder, 1953-2018